How does my portfolio look?

pjbltd

New Star Select Opportunities Fund (Accumulation) £1,150
New Star UK Alpha Fund (Accumulation) £1,340
JPMorgan Japan Fund (Income) £1,025
Jupiter Ecology Unit Trust (Income) £1,050
Sarasin AgriSar (Income) £1100


How does my Stocks and Shares ISA portfolio look to you?
Too risky?

I am trying to decide what to invest in with this tax year's allowance. I was thinking I could lower the risk of my portfolio by investing in bonds rather than equity funds.

Was thinking "Lincoln Corporate Bond Trust" (http://www.lfg.com/lfg/docs/uk/pdf/L2916.pdf) as it seems to have a very cautious investment objective.

Was also thinking I would sell units of the well performing funds (e.g. Jupiter Ecology) and buy more units of the badly performing funds (e.g. New Star Select Opps); Buy Low, Sell High!

Opinions and help are appreciated as always, thanks!

Ian_W

You're half way down page 2 so I'll give you a bump with my own inexpert opinion. Hopefully someone will be along with more expertise shortly.

How does my Stocks and Shares ISA portfolio look to you?

Erm, confusing TBH.
You've got Jupiter Ecology which suggests maybe ethical investing is important to you then New Star UK Alpha whose biggest sector investment is in aerospace and defence which is hardly tree-hugging territory! Both seem good funds BTW but any reason why an ethical global growth fund?
Why a Japanese fund without geographic sectors like Europe or Asia Pacific? Japan's been tipped as the "next big thing" over so many years I've lost count and up to now it's mostly disappointed.
The Agrisar looks a good punt with rising food prices and shortages, but 20% of your investment is a sizeable bet!

Was also thinking I would sell units of the well performing funds (e.g. Jupiter Ecology) and buy more units of the badly performing funds (e.g. New Star Select Opps); Buy Low, Sell High!

NS Select Ops has had a torrid time over the last 3yrs - see this page - or so and is pretty much at the bottom of the 300 funds in the UK All Co's sector over 1 & 3yrs. Patrick Evershed is a very experienced manager but he's obviously made some bad calls on the sectors and co's he's invested in recently.
Buy low, sell high is the mantra - but it only works if what's low goes up in value and what's high doesn't go up even more. Do you think the UK economy and the mid to small co's Evershed is invested in are likely to do better in the near future than mid size co's in other parts of the world that Jupiter Eco invests in?

Wouldn't comment on the Lincoln Bond itself but Corp Bond funds generally haven't done well recently, do you think it's about to change? If not there are other funds with low volatility like SOME of these Absolute Return ones, they all invest differently so you need to check them out individually but personally I've gone more for these recently than Bond funds.

HTH and prompts other comments.

Browntrout_2

There is a good website www.trustnet.co.uk where you can log in and create a portfolio of your funds.

Then you can run their free Scanner tool to analyze your portfolio, you can benchmark against any index or fund, it gives a pdf output option for printing.

It shows geographic weighting, IMA sectors, top 10 holdings, stock sectors across all your funds.

On first glance I would say you are missing the elephant in the room which is North America.

Of the MCSI World index the USA made up 41% in 2006.

I don't do bonds unless in a cautious managed or high income fund which allows the manager to decide asset allocation of fixed interest vs equities.

pjbltd

Thanks for the help guys! :money:

Browntrout - I registered on Trustnet and put in my portfolio and used their scanner. It was quite interesting but unfortunately a lot of the results had "Other" or N/A on them, so analysis was quite limited.

Yes I would like to invest in America but have not found any funds that I really like. For the US I am looking for a fund which is invests in Large Good US companies which have much of their operations overseas (therefore if there is a downturn in the US they should not be too damaged). I would also like to buy into a fund which has taken a knock recently but has good long term prospects.

Can anyone recommend any US Funds? Are Fidelity good for US funds?

Ian W - My holding in Newstar UK Alpha is because I held units in New Star Special Situations which was merged with UK Alpha. I was more interested in investing in future technologies and power (solar, wind etc) than ethical investing so I picked Jupiter Ecology, it also has a big cash balance which I found attractive.

I think yields on Corp Bonds are good now and I am looking at the following funds to invest in:

Baille Gifford High Yield Bond
JPMorgan Global High Yield Bond Fund Accumulation Units
F&C High income

I have also heard CF Arch Cru Investment Portfolio A Accumulation is great for lowering your risk.
I won't have the money to invest until the end of next month so I hope none of these get too expense by that time!
My main reason why I have such a large stack in Agrisar is because the minimum investment was £1000 and I needed to use last year's tax allowance quick.

munk

I have also heard CF Arch Cru Investment Portfolio A Accumulation is great for lowering your risk.

It's a fairly young fund but to date it's been very low in volatility and with a definite upward trend in terms of performance. The only thing to perhaps consider is the charges involved with this one.

The initial charges according to Trustnet are 6%, although Hargreaves Lansdown offer 4% discount (or they did last time I bought into the fund) making their initial charge on it 2%. The annual management charges are also relatively high at 2.2% IIRC.

Whether or not this is too much depends on how you look at it. Personally the peace of mind that the low volatility + consistent upward performance brings, I'm happy with the high charges. At the end of the day if it can pull 8% pa after charges consistently then for a cautious portfolio that's all I'm after - I'm after something that's slightly better than the highest high interest savings account but without too much volatility. Have a look at the curve on Bloomberg, it's probably similar to what a high interest savings account's performance would look like heh

After a month or so I'm now at a 1.43% loss (ie it's gone up by 0.57%). I'd expect it to continue fairly consistently at that rate so should break even in another 2-3 months or so and from there on in hopefully it'll be around the 8% pa mark which is fine. I'm constantly monitoring it though just in case it does suddenly start leaping around, to date though there's been no reason to worry, seems like on most days it doesn't move at all and the most I've seen it jump by is perhaps 0.5% on a day.

Another good low volatility fund is the Blackrock UK Absolute Alpha fund. Has been a consistently low volatile fund over the last 6 months of ridiculous market volatility, whether it will continue in 'calmer' markets is yet to be seen. Has moved nicely from 108.4 to 116.3 (7% gain) over last 6 months I've held it and done so very smoothly at that. Very happy with that fund, has been a rock in some pretty sticky times over last few months - more or less a substitute for chickening out completely into cash! Only problem now is deciding if it's 'safe' to come out of the fund into a slightly riskier equity based fund... might just leave it there to be honest, performance has been very decent.

purch

I think it is too early to make an accurate assesment of either the Blackrock Fund or this Cf Arch Cru fund

As for the portfolio, it appears a little confused, and it is hard to work out your strategy

pjbltd

my strategy was to pick funds I thought would do well and buy these before the last tax year expired ( I had 3200 and picked Ecology, Agrisar and Japan).

I already had the NewStar Funds in an ISA from my 21st bday a few years ago.

pjbltd

didn't realise JPM Japan was mainly small and mid cap firms, guess i'll have to hold that for the long term for growth

pjbltd

I've already made some money by investing in Agrisar and having the price rise but I am slightly confused...

The H-L website says the fund has "0 Holdings":
http://www.h-l.co.uk/fund_research/security_details.hl?sedol=B2Q8L64

Therefore my question is, how can the price of the OIEC fluctuate if the fund has no investments? I thought the price of a fund was based on the underlying value of what it had invested in:

e.g. if a Big Cap UK fund had 10% of its holdings in BP and BP stock rose 20%, all else being equal, the fund would rise 2%.

If someone could clear up my understanding it would really help, if for instance someone could reply with a simple formula on how OEIC pricing works!:rotfl:

turbobob

It can't have zero holdings. Its just that HL, or Trustnet where I think they take their information from, doesn't have that information at present.